The Wrong Way to Think About Imperial Empires

by Antoinette Burton

Antoinette
Burton is the author of new book, The
Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern
British Imperialism,
which was released in September 2015. She is Bastian Professor of
Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of History at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The recipient of a John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Burton is the author of
numerous works on the British Empire, women and feminism, and world
history.

It’s
amazing how persistent myths about imperialism are. We may finally be
past the fiction that western imperialism did more harm than good, or
that empire builders had the best interests of colonial subjects at
heart, or that women have had nothing to do with imperial ambition
and aspiration. But the notion that the best way to think of imperial
history is through a “rise and fall” narrative has remarkable
staying power. Even in the face of evidence that what really shapes
the dynamics of empire as it unfolds is recurrent small-scale
conflict and struggle, stories about the grand arcs of rise and fall
are still headline grabbers in our time. The example of Rome, of
course, remains a touchstone. Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published
between 1776-88)may track the downward trend of imperial
power, but its assumption that a grand rise precedes a precipitous
fall has provided a lasting template for how to think about the life
cycle of imperialism.

This
is especially true when it comes to understandings of the modern
British empire, whether popular or academic. Together with the idea
of Pax Britannica (a Victorian conceit which posits a mainly peaceful
imperium), the rise-and-fall arc has underwritten the majority of big
narrative histories of British imperialism since the nineteenth
century. Yet in the Victorian period, empire was less a matter of
easy ascendancy than a continuous bloody struggle for land, resources
and converts to both Christianity and to middle-class British ways of
life. Even at the so-called high noon of empire, colonial possessions
were always at risk of being unsettled, in large part because of the
challenges colonized people threw up at every turn. The rise-and-fall
model may be the easiest way to visualize empires in history, but it
does not capture the realities of the imperial project on ground,
then or now.

This
is a fairly obvious proposition. For it is surely common sense to
admit the possibility that imperial power was not incontrovertibly
successful, but was haltingly, fitfully so, especially given the vast
and far-flung territorial possessions that comprised the British
empire from the 1830s to the 1930s. And how reasonable is it for
historians to conclude that because mutinies were suppressed, strikes
broken and pass laws created, social and political order was thereby
unproblematically secured? Such an approach imagines that histories
of short-term events like the Indian uprising of 1857, or of longer
term conflicts like the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, tell the whole
story of imperial disorder on the ground. In fact empire was
constantly in trouble. Its troublemakers were well-known
nationalists like Mohandas Gandhi, to be sure, but they were also
ordinary people who pushed back against the incursions of market
capitalism, the theft of their land, and the remaking of their social
and cultural systems. Or they were spectacular insurgents like the
members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who bombed railway
carriages in late Victorian London and the jihadists on the northwest
frontier of India, who preached the end of British imperialism with
fiery rhetoric designed to incite loyalty to global Muslim communion.

In
these instances, as in many other cases of the dissent and disruption
that dogged the custodians of imperial power from Kingston to
Jellalabad to the Transkei, the British responded with military might
and other forms of micro- and macro-aggression. To pose a
counterweight to the rise and fall narratives of British imperialism
is not, therefore, to suggest that those native to the places the
British sought to conquer won all the battles or that empire was
ultimately powerless. It is to suggest that the way local polities
and communities resisted cannot be contained in parabolas – that
is, in a series of neat patterns of intense struggle that interrupted
otherwise peaceful periods of quiescence or even submission. Even
when battles appeared to be over and done and territory looked to be
settled, the British were scrambling to keep the peace and establish
political, economic and social order. Two wars to control China,
three wars to “settle” Afghanistan, nine to subdue the “Kaffirs”
before 1900 – this suggests not a confident stride but a rocky
terrain which routinely threw the would-be colonizers onto the
backfoot in the everyday contests of imperial rule.

What’s
more, those who inhabited the British empire’s vast imperial
dominions could see for themselves how troubled the empire regularly
was. Whether they witnessed successive British defeats on the
battlefield or participated themselves in strikes and boycotts,
indigenous peoples lived with the precariousness as well as the
violence of colonial rule. And however distant they may have been
from the scene of the action, readers of the wide array of newspapers
and magazines that chronicled the daily details of imperial war,
commercial activity and the quest for good government saw the trouble
that the Queen’s subjects made with their own eyes. We have been
slow to recognize how loose a fit there is between the trouble with
empire on the ground and the grand cyclical narrative that tends to
frame, and constrain, it. That belatedness is a symptom of how
effectively a rise-and-fall story can shield us from the realities of
imperialism as it happens if we are not careful readers, then as now.

Empire’s
rise and fall is a very seductive story, and it will likely continue
to be read backward onto former empires and forward onto emergent
ones. Those of us who seek a less coherent or predictive tale should
look beyond the headlines for the signs of trouble that lurk at the
edges. These are common enough to throw doubt on the viability of
empire as a rising tide and to allow us to see it for the ongoing
struggle it actually was. In the spaces in between we might learn
with more precision just exactly how empire falters. We may also come
to recognize how those it seeks to subdue make the kinds of trouble
that, in the end, shape the characteristic instability of imperialism
itself.